The story of how Alex Horne got into comedy is so perfect, it almost sounds made up. It started in Budgens, where the Taskmaster creator was working aged 19 as the deputy head of dairy (“there were two of us in the department”). At Christmas, the supermarket held a cracker joke-writing competition for employees. “I won the Budgens Christmas cracker joke of the year. The prize was an open spot at a local comedy club,” he says. “Once you do an open night and it goes well, it’s like a drug – it’s so addictive.” After that, he did comedy as a hobby at university, then as a side hustle alongside other jobs and finally, as a full-time career.
What was the joke that started it all? “It was: ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Oh, those were the days!’ It relies on the joke-teller to really give it something,” he deadpans.
Now, aged 44, Horne has come a long way from the dairy aisle in Budgens. His Bafta-winning comedy game show Taskmaster, which he hosts alongside Greg Davies, is in its 14th season. He’s also the front man of a six-piece comedy band, The Horne Section, which has spawned a BBC Radio 4 Show, a podcast, a Dave TV special and now, a brand new Channel 4 TV show, The Horne Section TV Show.
The new show is scripted, but it blurs the lines between fiction and reality. “It’s a show within a show,” he tells me from his home in Buckinghamshire, where he’s nursing a hangover after attending the National Television Awards (NTAs) the previous evening.
“It’s about me and my band trying to get a show on TV, so it’s quite meta,” he says, explaining that the band have indeed been angling for their own telly slot for years.
The premise is that Horne, sick of being Davies’ assistant on Taskmaster (his nickname on the show is “Little Alex Horne”, despite being 6ft 2in), pitches his own music chat show to Channel 4. Celebrity guests such as Martin Kemp and Big Zuu appear as themselves. He says it’s a bit like a 2020s version of The Monkees (the 1960s sitcom about a fictional, aspiring rock ’n’ roll band, which morphed into the real band as they started releasing music) with aspects of 30 Rock, Extras and Alan Partridge. What are his ambitions for it? “I hope that we prove not to have an awful sense of humour. Because we think it’s good, so if other people don’t, then we’re wrong.”
Viewers have at least been on board with his sense of humour in Taskmaster, which Channel 4 bought after it became a word-of-mouth hit on Dave – and which is fast becoming a national treasure.
Each series sees five different celebrities (mostly comedians) compete against each other in absurd challenges, like a wheelie bin obstacle course or catapulting a shoe into a bath. They’ve now had 85 people on the show, making it hard for Horne to pin down a favourite contestant.
“There are the types who I know well, like Tim Key, Mark Watson or Roisin Conaty. Then you’ve got people like Frank Skinner, Bob Mortimer or Mel Giedroyc – people who I don’t know, people who are above me in the comedy food chain, who were my heroes, and suddenly they’re in my programme. That’s enjoyable but terrifying. I still very much feel like the underdog.”
Horne, who is married to the journalist Rachel Horne, with whom he has three children, spends a lot of time with long-time comedian pals Tim Key and Mark Watson.
“But Greg is right up there now. We’ve spent so much time together. In real life, he doesn’t boss me around.” What do a bunch of comedians get up to off-stage? “Tim, Greg and I went out recently and behaved like children. We went to the Groucho and bumped into [fellow comedian] Rosie Jones and had too much to drink. Rosie made me steal a stuffed owl from behind the bar.
“They were really angry. I woke up the next morning, not really remembering it. And Rosie texted me saying: ‘Where’s the owl now?’ Apparently, we gave it back. We’re badly behaved, in a nice way. There should be more bad behaviour, I think. Comedians have a responsibility to behave badly sometimes.”
Of course, temporarily swiping a stuffed owl is fairly inoffensive. But on a more serious note, does he think what’s acceptable in comedy is changing? “I don’t think so. It’s personal taste. I wouldn’t make a joke about the Queen dying after the Queen’s died, because my brain tells me not to do that. But that’s not anyone else telling me not to do it. You probably can, and people might say: ‘That’s awful’, but I think you’d still have a career. I think it’s fashionable to talk about cancel culture and woke-ism. I don’t think the landscape has changed nearly as much as people are making out.”
So-called “cancel culture” and comedy collided this summer when Scottish comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s Edinburgh Fringe show was axed, after complaints from staff and audience members about its content. What did Horne make of that?
“Well, it’s enhanced his ticket sales – he’s booked gigs off the back of it,” he says. (Later this month the comedian performs at the Eventim Apollo in London.) “I think it was handled badly. I think it is, again, much ado about nothing. The people who went to the gig knew Jerry’s stuff. He’s done the same type of thing for years. It’s what he does. He says it on the poster. There were a couple of gigs cancelled but it wasn’t ‘Jerry Sadowitz: cancelled’.”
With Horne’s preference for silliness over shock, it seems unlikely he’d find himself at the centre of controversy – and he’s generally happy flying under the radar. He has previously, for instance, described The Horne Section as “culty”.
Now they have their own TV show, does he still feel like that? “I think Channel 4 comedy can be culty,” he says. “I think Taskmaster is still culty, although being at the telly awards [Taskmaster was nominated for The Bruce Forsyth Entertainment Award at the NTAs] didn’t feel culty. That felt like we were stepping into the big boys’ world. But I love the cult label. I’d prefer a small number of people to really like it than a big number of people to not mind it.”
In some ways, it feels like Taskmaster has replaced the panel show, or at least offered a more interesting alternative. The genre’s ever-declining status was underlined by the news earlier this year of Mock the Week being canned.
“The main difference is that [the contestants] are working on their instincts. We don’t warn them about what’s going to happen,” says Horne as he compares Taskmaster with panel shows. “We also get them out from behind a desk. Personally, I’ve probably seen enough comedians behind desks now.”
Overall, what would he say is the secret to Taskmaster’s success? “I think the British public like having some escapism. We’ve benefited from the country turning into a disaster zone. Lockdown made people want some light relief, and that’s exactly what it is.”
Horne prefers larking around to skewering current affairs. “I know my limitations. I don’t like it if I have to try to be topical or political,” he says. “I’m lucky because I go to work and just do silly things all day. My job is pretty unaffected by how bad the world is. If anything, it helps.”
The Horne Section TV Show will be available on All4 from Thursday and will air on Channel 4 soon